gay rights movement

gay rights movement, civil rights movement that advocates equal rights for LGBTQ persons (i.e., for lesbians, gays [homosexual males], bisexuals, transgender persons, and queer persons); seeks to eliminate sodomy laws; and calls for an end to discrimination against LGBTQ persons in employment, credit, housing, public accommodations, and other areas of life. (Although the term gay is commonly used in reference to homosexual males, it is also used more generally to refer to homosexual males together with some or all other orientations within the LGBTQ community. This article will use the term in the latter sense.)

Gay rights prior to the 20th century

Religious admonitions against sexual relations between individuals of the same sex (particularly men) long stigmatized such behavior, but most legal codes in Europe were silent on the subject of homosexuality and bisexuality. The judicial systems of many predominantly Muslim countries invoked Islamic law (Sharīʿah) in a wide range of contexts, and many sexual or quasi-sexual acts, including same-sex intimacy, were criminalized in those countries and made subject to severe penalties, including execution.

Beginning in the 16th century, lawmakers in England began to categorize sexual relations between males as criminal rather than simply immoral. In the 1530s, during the reign of Henry VIII, England passed the Buggery Act, which made sexual relations between men a criminal offense punishable by death. In England and Great Britain, sodomy remained a capital offense punishable by hanging until 1861. Two decades later, in 1885, Parliament passed an amendment, sponsored by Henry Du Pré Labouchere, that created the offense of “gross indecency” for same-sex male sexual relations, enabling any form of sexual behavior between men to be prosecuted (lesbian sexual relations—because they were unimaginable to male legislators—were not subject to the law). Likewise, in Germany in the early 1870s, when the country was integrating the civil codes of various disparate kingdoms, the final German penal code included Paragraph 175, which criminalized same-sex male relations and made them subject to penalties including imprisonment and loss of civil rights.

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The beginning of the gay rights movement

Before the end of the 19th century there were scarcely any “movements” for gay rights. Indeed, in his poem “Two Loves” (1894), Lord Alfred (“Bosie”) Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover, declared “I [homosexuality] am the love that dare not speak its name.” Homosexual and bisexual men and women were given voice in 1897 with the founding of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee; WhK) in Berlin. Their first activity was a petition to call for the repeal of Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Penal Code (submitted 1898, 1922, and 1925). The committee published emancipation literature, sponsored rallies, and campaigned for legal reform throughout Germany as well as in the Netherlands and Austria, and by 1922 it had developed some 25 local chapters.

One of the founders of WhK was Magnus Hirschfeld, who in 1919 opened the Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft), which anticipated by decades other scientific centers (such as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, in the United States) that specialized in sex research. He also helped sponsor the World League of Sexual Reform, which was established in 1928 at a conference in Copenhagen.

Despite Paragraph 175 and the failure of the WhK to win its repeal, homosexual and bisexual men and women experienced a certain amount of freedom in Germany, particularly during the Weimar period, between the end of World War I and the Nazi seizure of power. In many larger German cities, gay nightlife became tolerated, and the number of gay publications increased. Indeed, according to some historians, the number of gay bars and periodicals in Berlin in the 1920s exceeded that in New York City six decades later. Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power ended this relatively liberal period. He ordered the reinvigorated enforcement of Paragraph 175, and on May 6, 1933, German student athletes raided and ransacked Hirschfeld’s archives and burned the institute’s materials in a public square.

Outside Germany other organizations were also created. For example, in 1914 the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology was founded by Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis for both promotional and educational purposes, and in the United States in 1924 Henry Gerber, an immigrant from Germany, founded the Society for Human Rights, which was chartered by the state of Illinois.

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Despite the formation of such groups, political activity by homosexuals and bisexuals was generally not very visible. Indeed, gays were often harassed by the police wherever they congregated. World War II and its aftermath began to change that. The war brought many young people to cities and brought visibility to the gay community. In the United States this greater visibility brought some backlash, particularly from the government and the police: the government often fired gay civil servants, the military attempted to purge its ranks of gay soldiers (a policy enacted during World War II), and police vice squads frequently raided gay bars and arrested their patrons. However, there was also greater political activity among gays, aimed in large measure at decriminalizing sodomy.

Gay rights progress from the mid-20th century

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Beginning in the mid-20th century, an increasing number of gay organizations were formed. The Cultuur en Ontspannings Centrum (“Culture and Recreation Center”), or COC, was founded in 1946 in Amsterdam. In the United States the first major male organization, founded in 1950–51 by Harry Hay in Los Angeles, was the Mattachine Society (its name reputedly derived from a medieval French society of masked players, the Société Mattachine, to represent the public “masking” of homosexuality), while the Daughters of Bilitis (named after the Sapphic love poems of Pierre Louÿs, Chansons de Bilitis), founded in 1955 by Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin in San Francisco, was a leading group for women. In addition, the United States saw the publication of a national gay periodical, One, which in 1958 won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that enabled it to be mailed through the U.S. Postal Service. In Britain in 1957 a commission chaired by Sir John Wolfenden issued a groundbreaking report (see Wolfenden Report) recommending that private homosexual liaisons between consenting adults be removed from the domain of criminal law; a decade later the recommendation was implemented by Parliament in the Sexual Offences Act.

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The gay rights movement was beginning to win victories for legal reform, particularly in western Europe, but perhaps the single defining event of gay activism occurred in the United States. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, was raided by the police. Nearly 400 people joined a riot that lasted 45 minutes and resumed on succeeding nights. “Stonewall” came to be commemorated annually in June with Gay Pride celebrations, not only in U.S. cities but also in several other countries (Gay Pride is also held at other times of the year in some countries).

In the 1970s and ’80s, gay political organizations proliferated, particularly in the United States and Europe, and spread to other parts of the globe, though their relative size, strength, and success—and toleration by authorities—varied significantly. Groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the United States and Stonewall and Outrage! in the United Kingdom—and several dozen similar organizations in continental Europe and elsewhere—began agitating for legal and social reforms. In addition, the transnational International Lesbian and Gay Association was founded in Coventry, England, in 1978. Now headquartered in Geneva and renamed the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA World), it plays a significant role in coordinating international efforts to promote human rights and fight discrimination against LGBTQ and intersex persons.

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In the United States, gay activists won support from the Democratic Party in 1980, when the party added to its platform nondiscrimination clause a plank including sexual orientation. This support, along with campaigns by gay activists urging gay men and women to “come out of the closet” (indeed, in the late 1980s, National Coming Out Day was established, and it is now celebrated on October 11 in most countries), encouraged gay men and women to enter the political arena as candidates. The first openly gay government officials in the United States were Jerry DeGrieck and Nancy Wechsler in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Both DeGrieck and Wechsler were elected in 1972 and came out while serving on the city council. In 1974 Wechsler was replaced on the council by Kathy Kozachenko, who, having run openly as a lesbian, thus became the first openly gay person to win office after coming out. In 1977 gay rights activist Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors; he was assassinated the following year. In 1983 Gerry Studds, a sitting U.S. representative from Massachusetts, became the first member of Congress to announce his homosexuality. Barney Frank, another member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts, also came out while serving in Congress in the 1980s. He was a powerful member of that body and within the Democratic Party into the 21st century. Tammy Baldwin, from Wisconsin, became the first openly gay politician to be elected to both the U.S. House (1998) and the U.S. Senate (2012). In 2009 Annise Parker was elected mayor of Houston, which made the fourth largest city in the U.S. the largest up to that time to elect an openly gay politician as mayor. In addition, in 2019 Lori Lightfoot became the first openly gay person to be elected mayor of Chicago; in 2021 Pete Buttigieg became the first openly gay U.S. cabinet member; and in 2025 Sarah McBride became the first openly transgender member of Congress.

Outside the United States, openly gay politicians also scored successes. In Canada in 1998 Glen Murray became the mayor of Winnipeg, Manitoba, which made him the first openly gay politician to lead a large city in that country. Large cities in Europe also were fertile grounds for success for openly gay politicians; for example, Bertrand Delanoë in Paris and Klaus Wowereit in Berlin were both elected mayor in 2001. At the local and national levels, the number of openly gay politicians increased dramatically during the 1990s and 2000s, and in 2009 Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became prime minister of Iceland, which made her the world’s first openly gay head of government. She was followed by Elio Di Rupo, who became prime minister of Belgium in 2011. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, openly gay politicians have had only limited success in winning office; notable elections to national legislatures included Patria Jiménez Flores in Mexico (1997), Mike Waters in South Africa (1999), and Clodovil Hernandes in Brazil (2006).

The issues emphasized by gay rights groups have varied since the 1970s by time and place; different national organizations have promoted policies specifically tailored to their country’s milieu. For example, whereas in some countries, particularly in Scandinavia, sodomy statutes never existed or were struck down relatively early, in other countries the situation was more complex. In the United States, with its strong federal tradition, the battle for the repeal of sodomy laws initially was fought at the state level. In 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick; 17 years later, however, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Court reversed itself, effectively overturning sodomy laws in Texas and 12 other states.

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Other issues of primary importance for the gay rights movement from the 1970s included combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic and promoting disease prevention and funding for research; lobbying government for nondiscriminatory policies in employment, housing, and other aspects of civil society; enabling unrestricted military service for openly gay and lesbian individuals; expanding hate crimes legislation to include protections for gays, including transgender individuals; and securing marriage rights for same-sex couples (see same-sex marriage).

In 2010 Democratic Pres. Barack Obama signed legislation that repealed the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy (1993–2011), which had permitted gay and lesbian individuals to serve in the military if they did not disclose their sexual orientation or engage in homosexual activity; the repeal effectively ended the ban on homosexuals in the military. During his presidential campaign in 2016 Republican candidate Donald Trump gained support by vowing to protect the rights of gay Americans and by criticizing a North Carolina law that allowed people to use public restrooms for a given sex only if the sex designated on their birth certificates was the same. In 2013 the Supreme Court recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry (Obergefell v. Hodges), and in 2020 the Court determined that firing an employee for being homosexual or transgender was a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964), which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex (Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia).

New limits on gay rights

From about the mid 2010s, public recognition and support of gay rights, as well as participation in the annual celebration of the LGBTQ+ community in the month of June, began to decline in the United States and other countries, as conservatives increasingly complained that the prevalence of homosexual or transgender people amounted to a pronounced disregard of traditional values and even a “culture war” against conservative citizens. In 2018 Trump himself backed away from his campaign stance by banning most transgender people from military service. And during his second term (2025– ) he issued a number of executive orders limiting the rights and recognition of transgender persons, including prohibiting federal insurance payments for gender transition care; mandating that federal agencies recognize only two “biological sexes”; denying federal funding to schools that allow transgender student athletes to compete as members of girls’ or women’s teams; and preventing primary and secondary schools from recognizing or accepting a student’s transgender or nonbinary identity.

Well before Trump’s second term (including the administration of Democratic Pres. Joe Biden [2021–25])—a number of state lawmakers introduced bills to prevent public primary and secondary schools from teaching about or even mentioning sexual orientation or gender identity or allowing students to use bathrooms not corresponding to their sex at birth. Several states also considered legislation banning transgender athletic competitions and gender-transition medical care. And in United States v. Skrmetti (2025), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a state law banning gender affirming medical care for transgender youth.

Similar or even more severe restrictions on the rights of gay persons were revived in other countries, particularly those governed by conservative parties. In April of 2025 the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that sex as a legislative term must refer to the assigned sex at birth, thus greatly limiting the rights of many transgender persons. Similar transitions occurred in other European countries, including Italy and Hungary, and even greater restrictions have been imposed elsewhere, including in Uganda and Indonesia.